Haut Corn!

Mary McLeod Bethune and early voice

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0:30From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter, dropping back in, as I hope to always do, and share with you, for this episode, some of the things that have been over the transom, so to speak for me, over the summer, because it's really neat stuff. Teaches us a lot of lessons and just gives us some history and lots of other things. And so I want to start with playing this clip. This is 1955, and this is a woman speaking.

1:07And remember, she's in I'm giving a speech mode of this era, and she was born in 1875. So this is somebody who learned how to do this before the turn of the last century. But she's giving a speech. Here she is. So just listen. You have been humble enough to permit a great God to take a life, reshape it, and mold it, and send it out to give out sunshine and love and peace and brotherhood.

1:45Now, what color do you think that woman was? To be perfectly honest, if I didn't know, and if I didn't know to listen for certain things, I would not be surprised to think that what we just heard was a white woman, when in fact, she was extremely not white. She was a black woman,

2:18very dark-skinned, for whatever it matters. She was born in South Carolina in a log cabin in 1875, and for whatever it's worth, raised among 16 other children. That's how humble her background was. That was Mary McLeod Bethune, and she was the famed and vastly successful and influential black educator of her era. That speech was only a few months before she passed away, but that's the way she sounded. What's important is to realize, one, how much a person can change their dialect or

2:53one of their dialects if they have to. It wasn't fair in her era that you would grow up speaking deep black English, which she almost certainly would have, given the circumstances that she grew up in. But then, if you're going to be a person of influence, you have to sound perfectly white. You have to learn how to do that right down to the intonations. Nobody has to do that now, and frankly, I think it's better, but it's almost magical that she and also Booker T. Washington pulled that off. But more to the point, why I wanted to play her was just for a kind of

3:24heuristic purpose. I think, especially we enlightened folk, we know that there is no way of speaking that black people are capable of only. So, black English is not genetic, and if someone says, well, you can tell that somebody's black even without seeing them, we're trained to kind of bristle and think, no, that's not true. There are black people who sound white, and there are white people who sound black. And deep down, we all know that, yes, that's true, but those are the exceptions. And so, generally, you can tell whether somebody is black without looking. You could turn

4:00that upside down and say you can tell somebody is white, but I think we all know what I mean. Meaning that our default sense, if you say, how does a black American talk, is not the way Pete Hegseth talks. We have a sense of there being at least a black scent. And we should, because the vast majority of black Americans do have black sense, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a different configuration of vowels. But the thing is, how these things were distributed throughout America's social history can be interestingly counterintuitive. So, for one thing, a Mary McLeod Bethune or an A.

4:34Philip Randolph or a Booker T. Washington had to be able to sound perfectly white in order to have any major kind of influence. That's kind of a weird thing about our past. But then, there are other

Black Manhattan before the Civil War

4:44soundscapes that we should think about. So, for example, this summer, I read this fascinating book called A Moment in the Sun. And it's about black Manhattan before the Civil War. Shane White, who is this wonderful historian, he's Australian and white of all things, but he is clearly quite obsessed with blackness in New York City between about 1820 and 1860. And he studied court records with an admirable obsessiveness. And he teaches us all sorts of things about black New York in that

5:17period. And it was a kind of an early Harlem Renaissance. But of course, I'm reading it, and I'm thinking, how did they talk? And then there's some interesting historical fact, and I'm thinking, yeah, but how did they talk? And then something about oysters, because everybody's eating oysters. And I'm thinking, yep, nice oysters. And after they finished them, what did they say? How did they talk? How did they sound? And of course, we can only know so much, because most commentary on it is brief and or indirect. But what we can know is this. Let me pull the camera back. You're in New York, and it's say 1835. There are a great many black people. Slavery is over. So it's

5:52not that they're all working in anonymity in white people's basements. They are out on the streets doing what people do. They're dressing up for no particular reason. They're being loud as all people do when they're young, and especially if they've just been emancipated. They're having a great time. There's all sorts of dancing. There's all sorts of oystering. And of course, there would have been a soundscape in terms of language. And it was a very interesting place, because I don't know about you, but my first expectation, based on the way oldie black people, as in black people before about 10

6:27minutes ago are often depicted, you'd be thinking, well, no, let's not say 10 minutes ago, but say in the 1800s, you'd be thinking they'd be speaking some sort of Southern black English that we associate with slavery and in exaggerated form with minstrel shows. And so all of the I is, et cetera.

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8:11Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to linkedin.com slash campaign terms and conditions apply. Nobody ever said I is, but there was a Southern

8:45Black English that was quite different from mainstream Standard English and quite different from even any colloquial White English of the North. It was very similar to Southern White. But there was a Southern Black English that sounded kind of like that thing that you see characters. And so, for example, Joe in Huckleberry Finn. That's pretty accurate. Twain did not ridicule Joe in using that dialect. Twain had clearly heard the real thing. There are various ways you can tell. And so, there was that. Now, in New York, that was not the way you spoke if you grew up there.

Accents and origins in old New York

9:19But suppose you were someone who was in New York from the South. Suppose, as you might be thinking, you escaped from the South, for example. There are any number of biographies you could have, but there were Black people who talked like that. However, they were not the majority. That was not the local-born way of talking. What else was there? Well, some people were from the Caribbean, it happened. You might be from Jamaica for some reason. You might be from Barbados. There are various biographies. And if you came from there, then you had the Caribbean accent.

9:51Or you might sound kind of Dutch. And this is something that it's really easy to lose. But, you know, the Dutch ran the show here for about the first 40 and change years. This is during slavery. And, you know, we think of sweet little Netherlands today, but really the Dutch were aggressive slavers, just like the English and the French and the Portuguese and the Spanish. And so, you had Dutch plantations. And for example, upstate New York, people worked in slavery under the Dutch here. One of

10:23those people was Sojourner Truth. And so, for example, we have her reciting her poem, Ain't I a Woman? To be honest, that's not how she would have put it. And Sojourner Truth would have not sounded like Maya Angelou or anything close. She had been raised under the Dutch, and she is directly said to have had a Dutch accent. She, to us, would have sounded utterly bizarre, because here she is. I don't know if she ever left American shores, and yet she would have sounded vaguely like some person you would meet at some UN convention or something like that, who was from the Netherlands. And so, there was that.

10:58Then, there were people who spoke flawed English because they were from Africa. If we're talking about black people, they were African-born black people. There were various reasons that such people would be here. One of them would have been that they were former slaves who had been brought from Africa, and they came when they were adults, and they never learned to speak English perfectly, because adults almost never do. So, you would have had people with African accents. But then, all of what I just described would be the other thing. The main thing would have been how you

11:28sounded if you were a black person born in or around New York City, and you never knew Africa, you never knew Jamaica, you hadn't worked under the Dutch, you had never been South, and you were glad you hadn't. How would you have sounded? You would have sounded pretty much like the whites around you. Not the white elite, but the whites around you, the ordinary people. There was no reason that you wouldn't. And so, black people didn't exist in virtual isolation from white people the way they often did, say, in the world of the Southern Plantation. It was a whole different lifestyle,

12:00and as unjustifiable as that lifestyle often was. I'm not saying there wasn't racism. I'm not saying there weren't social boundaries. The thing is, everybody was up in each other's faces. And remember, in New York in the 1800s, all of the action is down in what we now call lower Manhattan. This was a small city. And I mean, goodness, I'm so sick of Manhattan at this point. Manhattan is a small city. Manhattan is the size of a parking lot. But imagine if everything was happening just down in the lower part of it. So everybody's up in each other's faces. Yes, there were more interracial

12:31romances than you might think. And as such, if you were a black person in New York, yes, there were all sorts of indignities that you suffered. And yes, there was a black culture, but you kind of sounded like everybody else. And so you get these comments that from today's perspective are almost counterintuitive. And so an English woman comes through. And she's, you know, going around in New York with her carriage, and she's talking to as many people as she can. And she says at one point that the black women in New York, they express themselves in good language and with an enunciation

13:03as bold and clear as any Englishman. And you're thinking, well, how are these black women talking? Because there's a part of us that's thinking that they're going to sound like black women that we know today. They're going to talk like Jasmine Crockett or something. But no, that's not the way anybody in the North talked. They were talking just like everybody else. And it wasn't that she met some unusual black women. And she didn't mean that they sounded like Mary McLeod Bethune would sound in 1955, but they just sounded like ordinary people expressing themselves in ordinary ways,

13:35where by ordinary, what I mean in this case is whites, because they were so much more majoritists. That was the situation. And so the TV show, The Gilded Age, that wonderful confection about Gilded Age America that's never quite as exciting as Downton Abbey, only because we've all already seen Downton Abbey. Imagine if there had been no Downton Abbey, and then all of a sudden Julian Fellows comes up with The Gilded Age, I would be, you know, falling out of my seat. But they have this subplot family of Brooklyn bourgeoisie. And they've got the father, and they've got the mother,

14:07and they've got the daughter. And the daughter, played by Danae Benton, is a bright young woman on her way. And quite properly, they have her sounding like anybody white, except maybe with a certain black dusting, a certain cadence that she goes in now and then. Although to be honest, and the show need not be this precise, I wouldn't be surprised if the actual kind of person she's playing didn't even have that back then. I wouldn't be surprised if she did. But really, there was no reason for her to have even that because she's never lived in the South. Now the

14:40father character has. And so John Douglas Thompson plays him with a certain southern-ish, black-ish cadence. That's about right. And Audra McDonald kind of plays it down the middle. That is the way it would have been. And so it's not just that they're all sounding like that because you're supposed to sound polite in any costume drama. Really, that's the way those black people would have sounded. However, when I say that these people would have sounded just like anybody else, the thing is,

Vowel shifts and the sound of hot corn

15:10the way anybody else sounded was not quite what we're used to. For example, there is the weirdest record of the way black women selling corn on the street sounded. And so there's somebody who doesn't like it because they're too loud. These people are certainly not phoneticians. They're not writing about language. Almost nobody did. It's so frustrating if you're a linguist who wants to know how people sounded before about 15 minutes ago. But these people, they're on the street. There are a lot of them and they're making their noise because they're trying to sell their corn, their hot corn.

15:44Except, and you get this more than once, the way that these women said it was not hot corn. Instead, it was hot corn, hot corn. What's this hot? Now, our first thought is, well, it must be something Southern. But remember, these people aren't from the South. They grew up somewhere around Wall Street. So why are they saying hot corn? And you know what? That's the way white people were saying it too. It's the funniest thing how you can tie things together. So not long before this early

16:1819th century period. Benjamin Franklin, down in Philadelphia, had decided to propose a new spelling system for English. Because of course, our spelling system is a goddamned mess. We have 26 letters and really about 43 sounds. And so think about it. Think about on paper, put, cute, and cut. U, U, U, U. All of those with U. Is there one letter where you could do U and know exactly what

16:49it was? How do you even write U? Notice that you can't? That's not the way a spelling system is supposed to be. And frankly, we're stuck with it. But a lot of people have sensibly tried to get us past it. In fact, my very first episode of Lexicon Valley back in June 2016 was actually about spelling reform with one of the main proponents today. Franklin was one example of many. And what he did is he proposed an alphabet. And in doing that, just because he couldn't help it, he gave a sense of

17:21exactly how he spoke. So his idea was, for this sound, we want this letter. For this sound, we want that letter. Franklin is writing a long time ago. And in many ways, you can see that the way he spoke was different from the way we speak today. Anybody speaks today. In other words, you can see that especially with vowels, vowels are always changing around. Vowels are just one place in the vowel cosmos at a particular time. There's no reason for them to stay where they are. It's all just constantly

17:55kaleidoscopically, lava-lampically changing. Vowels change, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but never not. In words where we spell the sound ah with an o, like pot and hot, in mainstream Northeastern American English in, say, the late 1700s and then past the turn of that century. It was more like ah, not all, but instead of pot, pot. Instead of hot, hot. That's the way it was. Now, it's hard to

18:31imagine, but that's why it's hot corn. If the women were saying hot corn, then somebody would have written H-A-A-T, but instead H-A-U-T, and they spell it in different ways, but it's clear that it was hot. Now, I want you not to make a mistake. This was not the British accent. The British accent that we're familiar with didn't exist yet or was just beginning to exist in, say, 1820, and only across the ocean where Americans couldn't hear it. And so, also, what Franklin shows is that whereas this

19:05British accent emerging would have part as pot, leaving the R off, here in America, everything was still part. There was no R-lessness yet. Now, that happened later. That's a complicated story. I've also talked about that on this show in one of my early episodes, but here, nobody's saying party yet. It's party here. And the word path here was still path. Over in Britain, part of the new British accent was for people to say path, fast, which sounds so posh to us. But here, it was still

19:39path. That aw is something where it held on in Britain, but then here, we took the aw and made it into an aw. And so, as I've mentioned before, British and American, until about 1830, were pretty much the same. You couldn't tell a Briton and American apart by their accents. But different things happened in different places. First, in both places, we had a little pot, hot. Britain kept it. We took that and changed it. There's a continuum between four sounds. And so, there's

20:12a phonetic grid that I'm not going to try to convey through this medium. But basically, ah, ah, aw, oh. They're like choo-choo trains. They're all one sound leading to another. And in real life, in terms of how these things change over time, it's aw, like that. There's always movement like that. It's kind of like on a chessboard. And so, if you've got aw, well, it might change to o, or aw might change to ah, or it might stay where it is. So, aw in Britain and America,

20:48pot, hot. Britain keeps it. And so, hot sounds posh to us. Our aw went back to ah. So, oh, ah, back to ah. And so, we have pot. And what it means, and as you can imagine, you know, the hot is not the only thing. But the reason black women are depicted as saying hot corn is nothing black at all because everybody was talking about hot corn here in America. So, if we could go back to that time, after we got used to basically dying every five minutes of some damn disease,

21:19we would have noticed that people just sounded odd. It would be really interesting to immerse in it. In any case, Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram and edited by, as always, Mike Volo. I'll be back again next week with some cutting-edge evidence about that whole thing that I've talked about on the show before, where there is the explosion in the use of am in old varieties of black English, at least the way it was depicted. And so, you am, he am. I've been

21:49obsessed with that for about 10 years. And we associate it with minstrel shows and lampooning black people, etc. And that's perfectly natural. But the thing is, if black people did, in fact, ever talk that way, where did they get it from? And you know what? Preview, they did use am in that way. It's a really interesting historical facet of the dialect. And I hope you will join me and hear about the latest steps in my journey with Am.

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